Seagate's Backup Plus Ultra Touch external hard drives provide a quaint touch of class in a market rife with uniformly dull, plastic-encased storage devices. This portable drive ($89.99 for the 2TB version reviewed here) has a rare trait in mobile tech: texture. It's covered with a woven fabric that makes it feel like a familiar, friendly object in your hand. Plus, you get some extra peace of mind: It's easy to password-protect the Ultra Touch, and your data gets secured with 256-bit AES hardware encryption. All in all, this drive is well worth the money for Windows or Mac users, standing out in a category that's long reached commodity status.

This Hard Drive Dresses Up

First, the touchy-feely. The Ultra Touch's woven textile enclosure, available in black or white, wraps around the top face and one end of the drive's plastic case, lending a bit of style and grippability to what would otherwise be just another drab plastic drive enclosure. The drive I have in hand for testing is the white variety at the 2TB capacity. (Seagate also offers a $69.99 1TB capacity. You can get either color in either size.)

The fabric wrap aside, the enclosure is solid but lightweight, bearing a bright-white drive-activity LED at the bottom of the chassis' face, and a Micro-USB Type-B connector along the bottom edge. (This drive-side connector may look nonstandard, but replacement cables using this connector are widely available.) The chassis' edges are soft and rounded, with no sharp corners to poke or snag on a shirt pocket or laptop bag compartment. Seagate's swirl logo lives, unobtrusively, in the lower left-hand corner of the case.

As you would expect, the drive is small and light, measuring only 0.46 inch thick with a 3.1-by-4.5-inch footprint. It weighs just 5.3 ounces. (That's just about the same size as, but 1.7 ounces lighter than, the similar Mobile Drive by LaCie, a 2019 release that I am reviewing alongside this model.)

Even though the drive enclosure is plastic, the whole thing feels solid and sturdy. It's inexpensive, but not cheap. As for the fabric coat, it remains to be seen how well it resists scuffing and dirt; you can't just throw it in the washer/dryer, after all. One thing to note: While the fabric has a pleasing, humanizing feel, I didn't find it all that much grippier or anti-slip than sheer plastic or metal.

Capacities and Interfaces

Although even the higher-capacity of Seagate's two Ultra Touch drives isn't a storage monster (you can find portable drives around this size with 4TB or 5TB mechanisms inside), the 2TB unit I am looking at still delivers a fair amount of storage for mainstream use. After all, a 2TB drive can hold, say, roughly 4 million 500K photos or half a million typical MP3s. For most folks, that's a lifetime's worth of music and photos, unless they tend to save in lossless music formats or very high-res photo formats.

At an $89.99 MSRP for this 2TB version, the bottom-line price of storage here is an appealing 4.5 cents per gigabyte. At times, you'll see 2TB portable drives on sale for $10 or $20 less, so we expect the Ultra Touch to see similar reseller discounting to stay competitive. The 1TB version of the drive is a much lesser value given the $69.99 MSRP and thus, the much higher cost per gig. If you might need the full 2TB of space, get the full 2TB.

Indeed, 2TB seems to be the capacity sweet spot these days for platter-based portable drives. That's good, because the typical usage case for this sort of device is either media storage (music, photos, or video) or backups, and 2TB is usually enough to do the job. Of course, many of us use external drives for both, and there's plenty of room for the drive to do double duty, unless you're a serious photographer or videographer.

The Ultra Touch supports USB 3.x over either a USB Type-A or USB Type-C connection. The Micro-USB Type-B cable terminates in an ordinary Type-A port, and a Type-A-to-C adapter comes in the box. The drive is, of course, also compatible with USB 2.0, but transfer speeds will slow way down if you use one of those ports.

By default, the drive comes formatted in the exFAT file system, which will be fine for most Windows or Mac installations and allows for cross-platform readability. Mac users may need to format the drive in HFS+ if they wish to use Apple's Time Machine. And some Windows users may wish to reformat the drive to NTFS for optimal performance. If you decide to reformat, don't forget to first copy any backup or other utilities to another drive temporarily, then copy them back to the Ultra Touch after formatting.

Security and Software

As noted earlier, the market for external portable hard drives is saturated. All the drives you see from major manufacturers tend to perform similarly, they're all well made, and they even cost about the same. Drive makers need other ways to differentiate them.

Given that these devices contain valuable (indeed, sometimes irreplaceable) information and are small enough to be easily lost or stolen, one good differentiator is to provide a measure of easy-to-deploy security. That's what Seagate has done here. In fact, Seagate has provided Backup Plus Ultra Touch buyers with a double measure.

First, the drive can be password-protected. During setup, you'll be asked to provide a password. (It's optional, though.) Be careful, because once you have designated a password, you'll need it to unlock your drive, and if you lose it, Seagate can't rescue you. You can always reset the drive, if you must, but doing so erases any stored data.

Second, data on the Ultra Touch is protected with AES-256 hardware encryption. If you're not up on data encryption technologies, just know: This is pretty stern stuff. Some estimate that it would take a supercomputer many hundreds of thousands of years to brute-force its way into a device protected with AES-256. Could the NSA or some other such entity open up your drive? Perhaps, especially if the agency has managed to backdoor its way in. But you can consider your data well protected from casual and serious intrusions shy of a determined government agency. (And really, if you're concerned about the NSA getting into your business, you have bigger worries than which hard drive to buy.)

Another differentiator comes in the form of Seagate's Toolkit utility, which lets users manage passwords and security, and also allows them to set up backup and sync plans and restore data. The Toolkit can also be used to create manual backups, if you prefer not to automate that process. (See our beginner's guide to PC backup for a broad view.) On the downside, the Toolkit does not reside on the drive itself; you must download it, generally at the same time you register the drive...

In addition, Seagate bundles with the drive a one-year complimentary subscription to Mylio Create, a photo-organization application that helps you edit, share, and sync your images across multiple devices. If you're a passionate photographer who takes hundreds of photos every week, you may find Mylio Create useful, assuming that you're not already using Photoshop Elements, Affinity Photo, or some other photo manager.

Again, these products are made available to you during product registration; they're not installed on the drive. You'll need to have a live internet connection to proceed through these trials if you want them.

The Performance View: On-Par Platter

Unsurprisingly, the 2TB Ultra Touch drive performs...well, much like any other similar, well-made 5,400rpm device from a major manufacturer. PC Labs' specific benchmark results appear below, but you'll note that the scores from all of the devices fall within a close spread.

We started with the drive formatted to NTFS on our Windows 10 storage testbed. The PCMark 7 Secondary Storage Test measures drive performance while simulating a series of real-world productivity workloads...

On this test, the Ultra Touch scored 1,245, a bit better than the LaCie Mobile Drive and a bit below the WD My Passport. The ADATA and WD Elements entries here handily outscored the Ultra Touch, but all five drives were within a range of 700 points; in the real world, performance differences would be just about unnoticeable, barring some edge cases.

Next up: Crystal DiskMark. Its sequential read/write tests are a straight-line, best-case scenario of raw speed with a continuously placed data set. It measures read and write speeds in megabytes per second (MBps).

The Backup Plus Ultra Touch did as well as, or better than, the other tested drives. But as expected, they all performed similarly. While the Ultra Touch returned the fastest read speed and second-fastest write speed of the tested drives, the ADATA HD830's and LaCie Mobile Drive's write speeds outperformed it just a smidge.

PC Labs then turned to a 2016 MacBook Pro and formatted the drive to the exFAT file system to run the BlackMagic Disk Speed Test...

No surprises here, either. Of the drives we tested, all of the scores came in within a few digits of one another, with the Backup Plus Ultra Touch leading the pack. The unit's sister drive, the 2TB LaCie Mobile Drive, once again posted very similar numbers. (LaCie is is a sub-brand of Seagate's.) The WD My Passport brought up the back of the pack.

In our drag-and-drop folder transfer test, which involves copying a 1.2GB folder from one folder location on the drive to another, the Backup Plus Ultra Touch tied with the LaCie Mobile Drive, both taking 11 seconds to make the transfer...

The other drives tested took longer, but only by a second or two. It's a wash.

Classy Looks, Performance on Par

The Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch ticks all the boxes for an external portable hard drive. The woven fabric cover gives the unit a touch of class, the performance is on point, and the built-in security and Seagate utility add more value. If you're looking for secure, affordable storage that can compete with the best of them, the Backup Plus Ultra Touch is a solid pick with a warm, fuzzy side—something you can seldom say about the world of PC storage.

About the Author

Rod Scher is a former director of technology of Cliffs Notes and several other companies, and is a retired teacher and software developer. For many years, he was the editor of Smart Computing Magazine. He is the author or annotator of several books, including Leveling the Playing Field: The Democratization of Technology. Scher spends much of his time traveling the country in a small motorhome with his wife, which gives him an excellent opportunity to test mobile computing gear, while attempting to explain to the IRS that all of his travel expenses are therefore tax-deductible. See Full Bio